Alison Townsend

Demeter Faces Facts - Poem by Alison Townsend

No matter what you do, she's a girl looking both waysisn't she? When you really think about it. When you standin her shoes, whether they are the open-toed, gold sandalsof Greek myth, platform wedges and Indian water-buffalo

slides of your youth, or those sequined flip-flops that are new again this year, dangling from her slender, silver toe-ringed foot, while a tattooed dragonfly dries its blue wing on her ankle as if she were the first to ever

dream it. Thirteen now, but no matter how she dresses, she's still your girl, isn't she, standing between worlds, looking both ways, forward and back, like you taught her to before crossing a street? But deciding herself. And you're

her mother. When you braid her hair, brushing out the night you know she's taken inside her, picking bits of leaf and dirt from the long, sun-streaked strands, your fingers tangle, catching on the knots of all she hasn't said.

the face whose curve you shaped with your own hand, fugitive, a sullen stranger's you'll never touch the same way again. Still, you keep brushing and braiding, separating the strands and binding them together again, as if they were

a rope by which you could hold her, tethering her to your body as she was once anchored and fed, your blood hers. Before she got big enough to cross the street without looking back to catch your eye. When you were still everything she needed.